Unreal Engine 4 & Merch

T-Shirts

Firstly there is a new button up there in the menu called “Merch”, click this and it will take you to a store where you will be able to buy Squid In A Box merchandise like T-Shirts and mugs. Aside from buying the games buying some Merch is the best way you can help support me in developing new products. Right now there are 2 T-Shirt Designs available in mens and womens sizes.

Waves 2

Those that have been following the facebook page or my twitter will have noticed that over the last couple of months I’ve been hard at work porting Waves from the old Unreal Development Kit to the new Unreal Engine 4.

This is part of a project to bring you all a lovely shiny sequel to Waves (code named Waves 2: Wave Harder) in order to help fund Notorious (previously Waves: Arena Tactics).

The port is the first step on the road to a sequel, UE4 only uses C++ and I haven’t used C++ in about 5 years and even then only sparingly. With the highly favorable royalty terms(5% vs 25% for UDK) of UE4 I couldn’t justify carrying on development of Notorious on the older engine but Notorious is such a large project I couldn’t afford to spend a year porting the (far more complex) code for that game when I can barely remember how to C++.

So far about 80% of the gameplay code is ported over to the new engine but there is still lots left to go with all the non-gameplay code such as GUI, Steam integration, leaderboards etc.

Everything is getting something of a face lift as I implement it as the engine has subtle differences which makes things possible that I couldn’t do before like GPU accelerated particle effects.

There is also a fair bit of code from Notorious in here as I just found better ways of doing things while I was working on that game and it was silly not to take advantage of them. The Enemies now have multiple AI behaviors and can prioritize targets which makes the possibility of multiplayer/co-op a reality now.

The actual game modes have been made easier to author as well with the horrible Kismet powered system I was using before being replaced with a Hierarchical behavior tree which allows the game to look at the game state and make decisions about what is more appropriate to spawn to keep the game fun. That last bit will likely be where 90% of my balancing time goes I’m sure.

This project also lets me go back and fix a lot of the things I didn’t like about Waves like the slow friends leaderboards and the way that after a while you could chain bombs almost forever.

This is just the porting stage though. This is so I can get used to using C++ again and have a code base to work off and develop an actual Sequel. Most of the old game modes will return; although Challenge will be replaced with a completely new mode inspired by the Adventure mode in Hyrule Warriors, but they will be tweaked quite a lot and the details will be different. There will be some new enemies as well as the old ones (The Evader is now 200% more annoying) and some new weapon options borrowed from Notorious.

Keep an eye on here and the Facebook page for updates as I will be making Alpha access for early adopters available before the end of the year and should have a short video update available next week.